File:Early Spring in the Western United States (MODIS 2022-03-27).jpg

English: On March 24, 2022, the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) on board NASA’s Terra satellite captured a true-color image of a sunny early-spring day in the Western United States. The color palette remains solidly winter-toned, colored in white, gray shades, and tans. Greens appear only in a very few areas, such as the deep greens of the southern forests, very pale washes of light green where grasses or scrub are thick, and most notably, the gray-green color marking the southern half of the Great Salt Lake, Utah. White snow sits atop the highest elevations, including California’s Sierra Nevada range (seen in the southwest corner), the peaks of the Great Basin across Nevada and Utah, the highlands of the Colorado Plateau in Arizona, Utah, New Mexico, and Colorado, as well as the Rocky Mountain chain that span the scene from southeast to northwest. Light gray marks salt flats found in some of the lower valleys of Nevada and Utah, including the massive Bonneville Salt Flats southwest of the Great Salt Lake.